TechPhonesAndroid PhonesWhy OnePlus and the Samsung Galaxy should fear the Nothing PhoneThe Nothing Phone could be the most interesting thing to hit Android in yearsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
TechPhonesAndroid PhonesWhy OnePlus and the Samsung Galaxy should fear the Nothing PhoneThe Nothing Phone could be the most interesting thing to hit Android in yearsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
The Nothing Phone could be the most interesting thing to hit Android in years
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Nothing)
(Image credit: Nothing)
Carl Pei has Nothing to declare. TheOnePlusco-founder has a new phone, the Nothing Phone 1, and while details are currently very, very scarce it’s clear that the entrepreneur intends to make a big splash in thebest smartphoneworld.
And that’s something that should worry Pei’s former firm OnePlus as well asSamsungand evenApple, because that’s who Nothing is taking aim at. If you think smartphones are all starting to resemble one another, the Nothing Phone 1 could make things more interesting and tempt away some of their traditional buyers.
According to Pei, Nothing’s goal is to effectively do what Apple orDysondoes: to have a suite of products with a very distinct visual identity, and to stand out in a market that’s becoming increasingly homogenous. Pei wants Nothing to stand out from thebest Samsung Galaxy phonesandbest iPhones.
Nothing’s design director is former Dyson design lead Adam Bates; as Pei toldThe Verge, Bates brought much of his old team with him “so we probably have one of the best industrial design teams in the world.”
I think Nothing has the potential to be, well, something.
Why Nothing matters
Design is really important. It’s why Dyson can charge a premium for pretty much everything it makes, and it’s a big part of how Apple became the phenomenon it is today. Take the iPod: specs-wise it wasn’t as good as rivals, but it was so much better designed; theiPhonelacked some important features but sold like hotcakes. In both cases what you were buying wasn’t a spec sheet; it was the overall experience from the packaging to the user interface.
If you look atAndroidright now, an awful lot of firms are selling spec sheets. I’m an iPhone user and to my eyes it’s really hard to distinguish Android phones from one another: they all look the same, they all have the same if slightly tweaked Android, and they all come in with essentially the same specs for each essentially similar price. And that’s fine, but it hardly makes the heart sing. So I’d love to see a company coming in with a bold, design-first approach to the whole thing: the hardware, the OS, the entire ecosystem.
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Could that be Nothing? It’s hard to tell. Right now Nothing is currently a one product company: it makes impressive earbuds called “Ear (1)”. We like them a lot: in ourNothing Ear (1) Buds review, we said that as of their launch in late 2021, “you won’t find a better pair of affordable noise-cancelling buds”. The proposition is simple: great design, great spec, great price.
Should we believe the hype? For now, no: we won’t see the actual phone until summertime, and until then there’s nothing to demonstrate that Nothing will deliver on its promises.
And we have been here before: Android creator Andy Rubin’s Essential Phone, now discontinued, is only likely to be remembered for introducing the notch; the brand has since been sold – to Nothing.
But the phone market could do with an injection of excitement right now, as as good as the latestSamsung Galaxyand Apple iPhones are, the magic of a new release is nowhere near what it was 5 to 10 years ago – and Nothing has at least the potential to rekindle that.
As another phone firm might put it: maybe it’s time to Think Different about what thebest Android phoneshould be.
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